Canada ties Uganda, Uzbekistan and Grenada in gold-medal count

LONDON—Congratulations, Canada’s Olympic team! You just followed up your country’s greatest sporting moment, the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, by finishing tied with Uganda, Uzbekistan and Grenada in the gold-medal count at the 2012 London Games!

That’s Grenada, pop. 104,890. But don’t feel bad: Y’all kicked the snot out of Tajikistan, Afghanistan and Turkmenistan. Clobbered them all 1-0.

With that in mind, let’s all take a moment to bless Toronto’s Rosie MacLennan, the Olympic trampoline champion, for staving off Canada’s first gold-medal shutout since 1976 in Montreal, when the maple leaf became the only host nation not to command the top step of a podium for the first of two times.

We begin with the negativity, only to set up the curveball of positivity. Canada’s performance at the London Games was certainly short on gold and silver medals. The maple leaf won three golds and nine silvers four years ago in Beijing. The respective totals here were one and five. Still, 18 total medals — the same number procured in Beijing — was a respectable haul.

If you know anything about the hows and whys of winning those coveted baubles on ribbons, you’ll know that Canada is only beginning to figure out how to do it. There’s every reason to believe we can do it better in the days ahead.

Let’s be clear: While the host Brits basked in the glow, Canada didn’t reach its target in London. The murky national agenda, on the eve of the 30th Olympiad, was to be among the “top 12.” We say “murky” because, when it comes to setting a pre-Olympic goals, Canada can almost always be accused of moving the goalposts. Two-plus years ago in Vancouver, the leaders of the home team spoke of their wish to win the most total medals. When the host nation fell short of the required tally, suddenly the bureaucrats were trumpeting the beauty of a different metric — specifically, the gold-medal table. In Vancouver — shock of shocks — Canada won 14 golds, more than any nation on the planet.

This time around, the total-medal haul has replaced it as the target for obvious reasons. We’d humbly suggest even Dion Phaneuf could occasionally hit the net if he were shooting at two. But no matter. Canada, which finished 36th in gold-medal-based rankings here, finished 13th in total medals. In other words, any way you spin it, the mission has not been accomplished.

There are many reasons why the red and white didn’t do better. Just as there were out-of-the-blue overachievements — Derek Drouin’s bronze in high jump comes to mind; and Damian Warner’s fifth-place finish in decathlon illustrates how an off-the-podium performance can be just as inspiring as a top-three finish — there were plenty of medal hopes who went home without one, among them mountain biker Catharine Pendrel, and track cyclists Tara Whitten and Zach Bell.

There were also a handful of injuries that limited the performances of Canadians who have a track record of being among the world’s elite. Shot putter Dylan Armstrong, the reigning world silver medallist, was stymied by a bum elbow and finished fifth. Triathlete Paula Findlay, ranked No. 1 in the world early last year, struggled with a year-long hip problem and finished last. There was even a tragic death: The 2011 passing of Hickstead, the gold-medal horse that amounted to the country’s finest equestrian hope, quashed Eric Lamaze’s dream of repeating his Beijing triumph.

Some of it comes down to the reality of the scale of the Winter Games versus their summer brethren. Eighty-four nations took part in the Vancouver Olympics. There were 204 here, where the global talent pool is scarily deep. The U.S., which topped these Games with both an astounding 46 gold medals and 104 total medals, is a juggernaut with a zillion built-in advantages over its northern neighbour, from a population base 10 times the size to a NCAA development system that churns out pros.

China, with 38 golds and 87 total medals here, took a big step back in the wake of its 51 golds in Beijing. But the world’s most populous country remains an athletic machine to be feared.

While Canada can hope to compete with those powers in the Winter Games, it’s probably unrealistic to believe that the same will ever hold true in the summer.

Still, as a nation, we’re relatively new to investing substantially in Olympic success. We’re newer still at pouring targeted dollars into Summer Olympic success. While the gold rush of Vancouver was the result of a well-funded lead-up that spanned as many as seven years, the results here are, in large part, the fruits of about four years of targeted funding.

On Sunday, Marcel Aubut, the president of the Canadian Olympic Committee, reiterated his long-spoken call: Canada needs more funding if it’s to compete with the world’s elite. No one’s suggesting Canada should mimic the “development” strategies of the Chinese machine that has been known to treat talented children as state property, childhood be damned.

But Anne Merklinger, the CEO of the government-funded Own the Podium, which funnels some $35 million a year to summer athletes and teams deemed to have the best Olympic medal potential, pointed out in an interview that Canada is far behind many other countries when it comes to perfecting the art of identifying and developing young athletes with Olympic promise.

“We need to be more focused and deliberate in searching for talent,” Merklinger said.

This fall, Own the Podium, along with conducting the usual review of 2012’s successes and failures, will roll out a talent identification strategy in a number of sports, triathlon among them, to recruit the Olympians of 2020 and beyond.

Peter Cookson, the high-performance director of Rowing Canada, said that his organization’s talent ID program is about two years old. Rivals in Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Germany have a head start of about 10 years. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that Canada’s rowing operation — which tops Own the Podium’s funding list — was among the chief underperformers at these Games. Mike Spracklen, the 74-year-old coach of Canada’s men’s eight, pointed out that the country is currently suffering a shortage of talented rowers. Then again, one of the members of Spracklen’s silver-medal men’s eight, Jeremiah Brown, was a McMaster University football player before he caught the rowing bug while watching Canada win gold in the men’s eight at the Beijing Games.

In other words, there’s a shortage of rowers, but there also must be an untapped supply. Scouting football practices, and swim clubs and track meets could indeed be a sound strategy for the denizens of Canada’s publicly funded elite sports system — and don’t think Own the Podium hasn’t had the brainwave.

“It is about talent transfer,” said Merklinger. “How can we take an athlete who did really well in 100-metre track and transfer them to (bobsled)? How do we get athletes that might not be headed to a podium in swimming and move them into rowing, where there’s a big aerobic machine required? That’s about talent transfer, and we can get better at that.”

We can certainly get better than one gold. If Canada stays committed to the cause of building a better elite-sport infrastructure in the four years until the Rio Olympics, the likes of Uganda and Uzbekistan and Grenada should be very afraid.

-- Torstar News Services